IN THE DEBATE over public employee pension reform, there's been tension between those calling for changes and others fearful of unfairly penalizing hard-working public employees.

A potential middle ground was suggested when I met earlier this week with Healdsburg Mayor Jim Wood. He's the virtually unopposed candidate for the open Northern Sonoma-North Coast 2nd Assembly District seat.

His idea: cap public employee pension benefits at $100,000 per year.

It's no secret the current public employee retirement set-up is financially unsustainable. That's due to past promises that can't possibly be kept, absent crippling cutbacks in government services or numerous tax increases.

Average public employees, including teachers, street repair workers, librarians and gardeners, aren't the heart of the problem. Most neutral observers acknowledge that these folks have good jobs, earning fair pay and providing excellent service in return.

One cause of the pension plans' unsustainability is those mid- to upper-level employees who garner overly generous six-figure pensions and/or game the system.

Consider those notorious pension abuses that are simultaneously expensive and offensive to public sensibilities.

Think of the double-dippers who retire from one agency, such as Marin County's public employee retirement plan, and then seek a second post with another city or special-purpose district that subscribes to the state public pension plan, CalPERS. They then end up with two golden pensions.

Then there are the $200,000 senior managers, often at obscure special-purpose districts, who retired by age 55 ready for a second career. These are the lucky ones, receiving a pension that's 90 percent of their final year's salary, who then move into a second career.

Don't forget senior firefighters who "spike" their last year's salary by working oodles of overtime so that they can leave at age 50 with substantial six-figure lifetime pensions.

These abuses unfairly diminish the reputation of the men and women toiling at bottom to mid-level city and county jobs whose pensions rarely approach $100,000.

That's the point Mayor Wood made when we met to discuss issues he'll face once he gets to Sacramento.

It's an intriguing route toward bridging the gap between unions representing actual working folks and reformers.

While a $100,000 total cap for future employees, adjusted annually to the CPI index, isn't the sole solution, it's one step in the right direction.

The cap doesn't deal with the hundreds of billions of dollars in already accumulated but unfunded pension liabilities incurred by the state, localities and school districts.

What it does is eliminate the current scheme's most obvious excesses. The fact that a pro-union candidate like Wood suggests the concept is a hopeful sign that a new class of pragmatic legislators might be emerging.